Reviews

Charles Williams: The Third Inkling. Grevel Lindop. Reviewed by Scott McLaren. The Chapel of the Thorn: A Dramatic Poem. Charles Williams. Edited and Introduced by Sørina Higgins. Reviewed by Scott McLaren. Women and C.S. Lewis: What His Life and Literature Reveal For Today’s Culture. Carolyn Curtis and Mary Pomroy Key, eds. Reviewed by Rebekah Choat. Tolkien Among the Moderns. Edited by Ralph C. Wood. Reviewed by Andrew C. Stout. Tolkien. Raymond Edwards. Reviewed by Cait Coker. Children into Swans: Fairy Tales and the Pagan Imagination. Jan Beveridge. Reviewed by Brian Roberts. Trilby/The Crumb Fairy. Charles Nodier. Translated and adapted by Ruth Berman. Reviewed by Kelly Orazi. The Prince of the Aquamarines. Louise Cavalier Levesque. Trans. and with an afterword by Ruth Berman. Reviewed by Kelly Orazi. The Lessons of Nature in Mythology. Rachel S. McCoppin. Reviewed by Kristine Larsen. Hither Shore: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Tolkien Gesellschaft. Special issue: Nature and Landscape in Tolkien. Ed. Thomas Fornet-Ponse et al. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft. Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review. Ed. Marjorie Lamp Mead. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft. Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review. Ed. Michael D.C. Drout, Verlyn Flieger, and David Bratman. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft. The Skill of a Seeker: Rowling, Religion and Gen 9/11. Marilyn R. Pukkila. Reviewed by Emily Moniz Mirova. Light: C.S. Lewis's First and Final Short Story. Charlie W. Starr. Reviewed by Melody Green. The Story of Kullervo. J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited and introduced by Verlyn Flieger. Reviewed by Mike Foster. The Victorian Approach to Modernism in the Fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers. Aoife Leahy. Reviewed by Joe R. Christopher. Reading Joss Whedon. Rhonda V. Wilcox, Tanya R. Cochran, Cynthea Masson, and David Lavery, eds. Reviewed by by Janet Brennan Croft. Authors Rebekah Choat, Joe R. Christopher, Cait Coker, Janet Brennan Croft, Mike Foster, Melody Green, Kristine Larsen, Scott McLaren, Emily Moniz Mirova, Kelly Orazi, Brian Roberts, and Andrew C. Stout This book reviews is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol34/iss2/12


A Handbook of Cultural Economics
With a distinguished list of contributors and a wealth of combined academic experience from around the world this collection of highly valuable and digestible essays represents a worthy compendium of cultural economics. It is comprehensive in coverage, critical in its debate, and contemporary in bringing many of the relevant issues up to date. On too many occasions breadth of coverage corresponds with a lack of depth. This is clearly not so with this collection, the absolute variety of subjects included providing a wealth of coverage and serving as the book's principal strength.
As is so well explained in the introduction to the book, the material is broken down into themes: notably, the economic characteristics of cultural goods, cultural policy, the finance of culture, and analytical approaches to the study of cultural economics. Although cultural economics is clearly the focus of enquiry, the book addresses issues of applied economics that are equally of value to other areas, such as health and education, where the public nature of the good is migrating towards the domain of 'market forces'. Further issues such as social inclusion, the impact of greater regionalisation, the variety of objectives requiring different policy measures and incentive structuresoften driven by different patterns of ownership-and the conditions of both direct and indirect subsidies are central to many of the 61 chapters featured in the book.
One dilemma for the editor of the book was clearly how to organise such a variety of chapters. One can argue that although a large number of differences exist between all the component parts of cultural economics, enough common characteristics and shared problems exist to order them randomly-or alphabetically, as was the eventual choice. However, organising the chapters by theme would, I feel, have contributed to an even stronger text. As with any book of this nature, it is unlikely that the material is to be read cover to cover. By organising the material thematically, however, a more cohesive and useful series of sub-collections would have been provided. This said, at the end of each chapter links to other related chapters are provided for the reader. This is extremely useful in that it provides a route map for readers interested in particular thematic areas.
One particular feature of the book is the way in which there exists a mix of quite practical, applied chapters on the one hand and more academic, theoretical chapters on the other that together are so easily comprehensible. This is to the credit of the individual authors, and the editor, who although not writing their material for the novice are able to communicate their thoughts in a very logical, well thoughtthrough and consistent manner vis-à-vis language, terminology and ease of access. Shorter, opinion-based essays cover subjects as diverse as the anthropology of art, art prices, artistic freedom and the rights of artists, in addition to more generic essays on the cultural industries, cultural sustainability and festivals. Further essays on the gift economy, cultural globalisation and Internet culture provide many thoughtprovoking insights, as do chapters on opera and the overriding value of cultures. One particularly interesting and quite distinctive essay addresses those factors that underpin 'what makes a star a star', 1 whereby the talents of Britney Spears are discussed in terms of Rosen's 'The Economics of Superstars' in that small differences in talent often translate into large differences in earnings! A more practitioner focus is adopted with essays centred on art auctions, corporate arts sponsorship, the fixed book price agreement and the managing and marketing of the arts. This focus is also adopted for chapters relating to regulation of the cultural industries and tax concessions.
To complement the above, longer, more academic-style essays cover subjects as varied as welfare economics, artists' labour markets, heritage, the sociology of art, contingent valuation and the issue of public support. Finally, more analytical essays cover issues such as art markets, demand, and participation in the cultural industries.
Interestingly, no conclusion is provided to the myriad of issues raised in the essays throughout the book. Quite clearly this would have been a daunting and onerous task. Notwithstanding, the book raises many questions and provides an enormous catalyst for further study, research and debate. The provision of a route map for future analysis of the cultural industries would have been a very useful addition to the book, as would, perhaps, some future scenario projection as to how the editor and authors view the development of the four key themes identified in the introduction.
In conclusion, the editor deserves praise for bringing together such an eclectic mix of authors, interests and approaches to the examination of the cultural industries. The book is likely to be a valuable addition to the reading list of many undergraduate and postgraduate courses as well as of specific interest to academics, practitioners, curators and owners of cultural products. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the book is likely to be of interest to individuals with a fascination for the nation's cultural heritage and cultural economy, be it past, present or future. The Berlin Wall is a fascinating subject that has provided scholars with countless topics and aspects for their respective studies. Some have concentrated on the developments, events and processes leading up to its erection, and on the rulers in East Berlin who wanted to build it to stem a haemorrhage through which communist East Germany was bleeding to death: in excess of two million East Germans-about 15% of the GDR's working population-fled from the country between 1949 and 1961, most of them through Berlin, the one loophole left after the Iron Curtain separated Eastern and Western Europe, East and West Germany. As Hope M. Harrison has shown from her study of documents in Moscow archives, the initiative to build a Wall right through Berlin came from GDR leader Walter Ulbricht who 'drove the Soviets up the Wall', secretly clamouring, all through the 1950s, for permission to close the sector border in Berlin whilst shrugging off all counter-proposals from Moscow, which urged him to moderate his rigid and oppressive internal policy so that his people would not develop this massive urge to flee to the West. Others have looked very closely at the events and developments which led to the joyful and largely unheralded fall of the Wall in November 1989, the peaceful People's Revolution that toppled the by then bankrupt and paralytic state governed by a group of senile diehards who remained in power with the help of the ubiquitous secret police and their millions of informers. Yet others have made the physical remnants of the Wall their study because even these tawdry fragments provide first-hand and most instructive information about the way the Wall was run and how it worked as the deadly weapon wielded by a government, a party against its own people. All these aspects combine to make up the cultural significance of the Wall, cultural significance meaning 'aesthetic, historic, scientific, social or spiritual value for past, present and future generations', as the Burra Charter puts it. In other words, it is the human side of monuments, their significance to people, that makes preserving and studying them worthwhile. The Wall-The People's Story takes this approach quite literally by looking at the experiences of people who came into close and all-too-often deadly contact with the Wall. A quote from The Sunday Times on the back cover hails it as an 'exhaustively detailed book'-exhaustingly detailed might be more to the point. Countless interviews provide the fabric of a tale which stubbornly clings to its immediate subject. A handful of pages are devoted to the antecedents of the Wall and to the wider historical and political perspective in which this seemingly absurd edifice became a reality. But over more than 400 pages we are led through its history by the year, by the month, sometimes-for 13 August 1961 and 9 November 1989-even by the hour or minute. Every death at the Wall seems to be recorded: laconic vignettes giving names, dates and personal details of those who died at the Wall punctuate the narrative like grave markers. A constant drumbeat in the background, this recurrent reminder of the inhumanity and brutality of the Wall, of the fact that people kept dying there as they tried to get out of a country they experienced as a prison, is the most poignant element of the book. Normal human beings-not capitalist provocateurs or agents of Dark Forces bent on destroying the Workers' Paradise, as the border troops were led to believe by their senior officers and their political instructors-normal men, women and children tried to get across the border, and hundreds of them were killed as they did so.
No sentiment felt by anyone on either side of the Wall seems to go unrecorded and unreported: East Berliners, West Berliners, Allied soldiers, East German soldiers, foreign visitors. Their views and sentiments are presented uncommented and unreflected upon, and-in effect-left undoubted: a journalist's approach rather than an historian's. Letting everybody speak for themselves has the advantage of directness and authenticity but some readers might be interested in the author's assessment of his sources and their stories. Did he really take everything he was told at face value? The book gives this impression and of course one might take the position that as every person shapes their own story it becomes 'true' from their particular point of view. But should this be presented and accepted at face value by a researcher, without critical reflection-even in the case of the former border guard convicted-two years after the fall of the Wall-for shooting Chris Gueffroy, the last fugitive killed at the Wall? The guard is presented to us as a 'clean-cut young man' pleading that he only 'followed orders' and that he would have faced court-martial if he had refused to fire. At the time in question, however, in February 1989, the shoot-to-kill order had already been quietly rescinded and the border troops were authorised to fire only in self-defence: Gueffroy was unarmed and had stood motionless before the Wall when 10 bullets were fired into his body at point-blank range.
The Wall-The People's Story is an admirable and fascinating, highly detailed book-but its strength-that it stays within the rather narrow focus of individual experiences and remembrances-is also its weakness. The task of writing the true and full People's Story, the story of all the people whose lives were seriously affected by the Wall, would be rather larger than this book lets us assume. As Rainer Eppelmann-who was Minister of Disarmament and Defence in the GDR's last (and democratically elected) government-noted on the effect of the Wall on the citizens of the GDR: The imprisonment affected all of us, not just those who attempted to flee in spite of everything and were killed, because only with the hermetic closing of all borders did the SED [the East German Communist Party] become absolute master. Only now … could the party really claim to be the leading authority in politics, economics and society; to be the ever-present guardian who could grant or withhold opportunities of education or profession, of personal freedom, travel and leisure. We in the GDR lived in the knowledge that the system lives longer than you, there is no avoiding it.